We talk of the 'sacrifice' of the First World War, but we have lost our sense of what that word means

Thiepval, our largest war memorial, records the names of men with no graves

In 1925, Rudyard Kipling wrote an uncharacteristically restrained and sombre short story called The Gardener. It tells of a woman’s search for her illegitimate son, who goes missing in action on the Western Front. After the Armistice, she learns that he has been killed, and is buried in a military cemetery. Arriving there, she finds a man planting flowers in the earth and asks him where she might find her “nephew”.

The man looks at her “with infinite compassion,” and tells her “Come with me, and I will show you where your son lies”. As she leaves the graveyard, she looks back, and sees the man bending over his plants; “and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener”.

Those words, an echo of Mary Magdalene’s first sight of the Risen Jesus, often strike our generation as out of place. But for Kipling, who had lost his own son in the war (“Have you any news of my boy Jack?” begins his most heart-wrenching poem), the Easter reference was natural. He never wavered in his belief that Jack and all the rest had given their lives for others.

A century on, we have inherited Kipling’s vocabulary, but not the world-view that sustained it. We still speak of the “sacrifice” of the fallen, but we use the word perfunctorily, doubting whether anything could have merited such slaughter. We find disquieting – even today, of all days – the explicitly Paschal terms in which the poet described the loss of a generation of sons:

“They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us.”

Well, perhaps it was because of Easter, or perhaps because of the centenary year but, coming back from Strasbourg last week after the final session of the current European Parliament, I decided finally to visit Thiepval, where my great-uncle, William James Hannan, is commemorated along with 73,000 other British and South African soldiers.

I know little about the man, except that he was said to have been a promising golfer. He was killed in the Somme bloodbath on 21 October 1916, aged 24. He was, as the saying goes, a common soldier, a corporal in the Cheshire regiment; though no man who served in that place, on either side, can be accounted common.

“Somme,” wrote a Prussian veteran. “The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word”. A battle of slow attrition was waged over five-and-a-half months, generating 420,000 British and Commonwealth casualties, and a similar number of Germans. So colossal was the carnage that thousands of bodies were never recovered. My great-uncle Bill was one such.

The memorial at Thiepval, designed by Lutyens in an unwontedly stark and skeletal style, holds the names of those men, the men with no graves. They cover its bricks, recalling in their order long-since amalgamated line regiments and Pals battalions. I found him easily enough in the vast lists: Corporal W.J. Hannan, set between Corporals Handley and Johnson. Does anyone, I wonder, remember either of them?

Thiepval is a hamlet, with barely a hundred inhabitants. Sparse farmland stretches in all directions, furrowed fields interspersed with rapeseed. The idea of tens of thousands of men being cut down here, for no appreciable gain in territory, brings out everything we feel about the futility of World War One.

It takes an effort to recall that Kipling’s patriotism used to be much more common than Wilfred Owen’s cynicism. Attitudes have shifted markedly over the past century, from Owen’s verse through Oh What a Lovely War to Blackadder IV – that is, from bitterness to anger to something that borders almost on sneering.

It’s partly that we no longer worry about disrespecting surviving veterans, partly that we have become more squeamish about casualties, and partly that perspectives alter with time.

When I was a small boy, I was (as small boys are) uncomplicatedly pro-war. At ten or eleven, I started to read the war poets, but I was still mainly attracted by the heroic element in their verse: their endurance in testing circumstances. As a teenager, I began to wrestle with the whole question of whether Britain should have involved itself (probably not, I currently think, but it’s finely balanced). Now, I find the whole business almost too melancholy for words.

It could be that I’m becoming more sentimental; I think, though, that it’s because the fallen are closer in age to my children than to me. My old school, like most public schools, was filled with war memorials, but I had no more sense of mortality than any other teenager, and Remembrance services glided over me.

The same services at my children’s school move me to tears. To look at the assembled boys and girls during the roll-call of the fallen is unbearable.

The rituals of Remembrance Sunday – the silence, the prayers, Laurence Binyon’s words – were evolved to console the bereaved. Today, our grief is second-hand: almost none of us knew any of the war dead. But but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this makes it ersatz. Try looking up the details of your ancestors on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website – or indeed, if you’re male, try typing in your own name, and counting how many matches come up – and see how easily the tragedy touches you across the intervening century.

Kipling’s generation, the generation that mourned its sons, was the first to pass; then the generation which mourned its comrades; then that which mourned its fathers, clinging, perhaps, to fragmentary childhood picture-memories. Then the fallen became faces in yellowing photographs. Now they are names on family trees. Soon, they will be only notches on slabs. Yet we will remember them.

The immensity of the tragedy touches you across the intervening century